The first thing you see when you log in to your AdSense account is the Overview page of the Home tab. This is a great place to start, full of the most essential data you need to evaluate your AdSense performance.

But that’s not all you’ll find on the Home tab. When you want to monitor and manage your AdSense account, Home is the place to be.

Viewing Key Metrics

If you view only one page on the AdSense site, it should be the Overview page on the Home tab. This page, which is what you see by default when you log in to AdSense, displays essential information about your account’s performance, including earnings generated.

What information is displayed on the Overview page? Let’s take a look.

Earnings Overview

Want to know how much money your AdSense ads are generating? Look at the earnings overview at the top of the data on the Overview page, shown in Figure 4.1. Here you can view

Estimated earnings for today so far, yesterday, this month to date, and last month.

Finalized earnings, including any unpaid earnings (money you’re owed but haven’t yet been paid) and the most recent payment you’ve received from AdSense.

To view more payment details, click the Details link in the Finalized Earnings section; this opens the Payments page, discussed later in this chapter.

Note that the estimated earnings displayed here are just that—estimated. AdSense’s final earnings take into account any invalid clicks made to ads running on your site, and adjust the earnings amount accordingly.

NOTE

Invalid clicks are typically the result of click fraud, where unscrupulous individuals repeatedly click on their own ads with the intent to inflate PPC ad revenue. Google has mechanisms in place to detect click fraud, and will adjust key metrics as necessary.

Performance Summary

The middle section of the data table on the Overview page, shown in Figure 4.2, is the performance summary. This data provides a quick overview of your AdSense performance, broken down by product (Content, Feeds, Video, and so on).

The performance summary data table contains the following information:

Product, the specific AdSense product being tracked

Page views, the number of times pages with ads have been viewed

Clicks, the number of times ads on your site have been clicked

Page click-through-rate (CTR), the percentage of times viewed ads have been clicked—calculated by dividing page views by clicks

Cost per click (CPC), the average amount per click paid by advertisers

Page revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), the average amount of revenue generated by each 1,000 page views—calculated by dividing estimated total earnings by page views

Estimated earnings, the total amount of ad earnings generated in the specified time period

By default, this data table is sorted alphabetically by product. You can, however, sort by any metric just by clicking the column header; click the header twice to reverse the sort order.

Also by default, the performance section displays results for the past seven days. To examine another time period, click the Edit link above the table, and then select from Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, This Month, or Last month.

NOTE

To view the full set of AdSense performance reports, click the View Full Reports link. This opens the Performance Reports tab, discussed in Chapter 7, “Viewing AdSense’s New Performance Reports.”

By the way, if you’ve linked your AdSense and Google Analytics accounts, you can use Google Analytics to track your Google AdSense performance. Just click the View Performance in Google Analytics link.

NOTE

Google Analytics offers an even more robust set of tracking functions than what’s available with AdSense, so if you have that option, it might be worth pursuing.

Top Channels

If you have AdSense ads on multiple websites or blogs (what Google calls channels), you can view performance by site in the Top Channels section of the Overview data table. As you can see in Figure 4.3, this section of the data table displays your top performing sites, along with seven-day earnings for each site. This section also displays the change in earnings from the previous seven-day period.

Figure 4.3. Viewing performance by channel.

To view channel earnings for a different period, click the Last 7 Days link and select from Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, This Month, or Last Month. To view the full Custom Channels report (not just the top channels), click the View Full Report link.

Quick Reports and Saved Reports

In Google AdSense, the most commonly used reports are dubbed quick reports. These include the following reports:

Overview (this month)

Overview (last month)

Custom channels (today)

Custom channels (yesterday)

Custom channels (this month)

Custom channels (last month)

These quick reports, as well as any custom reports you’ve saved, are available from the Quick Reports section of the Overview page, shown in Figure 4.4. Just click a report to display it onscreen.